trafficmansionAs we have said numerous times on this blog, affiliate marketers need to focus on one thing more than anything else: generating quality traffic.
In order to make money online, affiliates need to make sure that their marketing efforts are seen by the right audience. Marketing everything to everyone doesn’t really make sense. In order to succeed in this business, it is of crucial importance to only target people who are most likely to buy what you’re promoting.
One way to get the attention of those type of people and increase the number of conversions is by investing in intelligent link building.
Understanding Link Building
Apart from listing your brand on various relevant domains across the web where your target audience hangs out, investing in link building also helps with increasing visibility in Google’s search.
Having high rankings in Google’s result pages can create an extremely positive effect on how people see and feel about your offerings. They will start to remember your domain name (and even your own, if you decide to directly promote yourself on your site), which will automatically make it easier for you to build trust in your offerings.
Once you process the fact that Google currently receives over 63,000 searches per second on any given day, it makes quite a lot of sense to invest in link building.
Even though you should definitely incorporate link building in your existing marketing strategy, however; that doesn’t necessarily mean that success from this type of practice comes on its own.
Link building is a slow and often fairly complex process. In order to start seeing results from your efforts in this department, you need to create a significant number of links on different popular and relevant domains across the web. The main problem here is that most authority domains are not really eager to link back to you. In order to make a link on a website that has a lot of respect and traffic in your niche, you’ll need to offer them something in exchange.
In the following segments of this article, we at Traffic Mansion are going to cover some of the more effective link building strategies that will help you get high-quality links from relevant domains.
1. Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is one of the oldest, most effective link building strategies out there. The goal of this approach is pretty straightforward: Create a list of relevant industry sites that are followed by your target audience, reach out to them and ask them to publish your content (with a contextual link pointing back to your site).
Sounds simple, right?
In theory, it does. But in practice, not so much.
The biggest problem with link building is that everyone is doing it. And I do mean EVERYONE.
Sites that generate decent traffic and have a consistent niche following are constantly bombarded with emails from marketers who are offering to write free content. This often clutters people’s inbox, making them allergic to guest posting.
However, that still doesn’t mean you should avoid guest blogging and move on to the next best thing.
Regardless of the fact that there’s no real guarantee that someone will approve your guest blogging request, you should try to pitch your ideas anyway. The thing is, everyone is still interested in publishing quality content. If you come up with a great idea and pitch to the right person in the right tone and manner, there’s still a huge possibility that your pitch will get noticed. You might be awarded with a chance to publish your content on a desired site.
The biggest problem with link building today is that a lot of marketers are too lazy to invest any real effort. When they reach out to editors, they send spam emails with generic topic ideas. Naturally, their request often gets ignored because people are not interested in publishing mediocre content.
If you really put in the work, come up with something that is actually original, and provide unique value for the targeted domain’s audience—you will probably get published.
2. Broken Link Building
Another quite simple but effective strategy for earning quality links is broken link building.
In this tactic, one would find broken links on relevant sites. Next, create something similar to the resources to which the link leads. Finally, ask the editor to link to your new, functional resource instead.
Even though this sounds like a lot of effort for a single link, that’s not really the case. You can use a tool like Ahrefs or a similar SEO tool to analyze relevant domains and find broken link opportunities. Scraping websites is now possible in just a few clicks, and so is checking the backlink portfolio of specific resources.
The idea here is to find a broken page that has lots of links pointing to it. Once you do that, you will be able to, metaphorically speaking; hit more flies with a single swing and get a ton of free links just by creating a single resource.
3. Unlinked Mentions
Even though most people know the value of a link today, it’s not really uncommon for businesses to mention other businesses and not link back to them. There are numerous reasons why this happens. Some people just forget to place a link while others are just too lazy. Whatever the reason may be, it’s in your best interest to chase down those unlinked mentions and ask people who are already talking about your business to award you with a link.
You can find unlinked mentions through a lot of different tools. Most people use Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a content change detection and notification service that sends emails to notify users whenever specific keywords and phrases get mentioned in some of the Google results. All you have to do is insert the keywords you want to be notified about in the tool.
For example, if you’re interested in knowing when someone mentions your brand, this tool will automatically find the latest content that has your company name in it and forward it to you via email.
Google Alerts is completely free of charge. It’s a great tool for quickly finding unclaimed mentions.
4. Grow Your Personal Brand
One of the best things you can do to elevate your link building game to the next level is to become a known figure in your industry. If people start to recognize you as an expert, they will organically link to your content.
Guys like John Chow, Matthew Woodward, and Pat Fynn have earned a lot of organic, high-quality links solely by speaking at conferences and sharing knowledge about affiliate marketing on their blogs.
Thanks to their contributions to the community, people have started recognizing them as the industry’s thought leaders. This is why their work is on the radar of everyone in the affiliate business and why they are often quoted in the expert roundups.
Because they have built names for themselves and committed to producing useful and relevant content, people link to their posts without them having to ask. Whenever someone like Matthew Woodward publishes a new blog post, he can expect fresh links as fast as within the first 24 hours post publication.
Even though this sounds like a pretty sweet scenario, becoming an authority figure is never an easy job. First of all, you have to be a true master of your craft. Secondly, you need to do a lot of self-marketing. Thirdly, it’s imperative that you create a lot of grade A content and publish it regularly on your blog, and also do a decent amount of guest blogging to build visibility for yourself.
On the bright side, however; this is something that you ought to be doing for yourself regardless of your plans with link building. Trust is the only thing that sells in 2019, and that’s not likely to change in the future. Today’s shoppers have a lot of options and they only buy from trusted parties. So, if you’re still not working on your brand and visibility online, you should really rethink your strategy.
Closing Words
Thank you for taking the time to read this article in its entirety. There are dozens of different strategies that you can use to generate links for your domain, but we feel these are the four best ones for affiliate marketers. As you can see from everything written above, link building is a slow and complex process that requires time and patience, so you shouldn’t really give up when the going gets tough. Just remember that this is something that everyone is doing and that you need to get as much love from Google as possible to get ahead of your competitors.
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